Friday, June 26, 2015

NewRuskinCollege.comJune-6-2015

Lecture Notes

Eulogy 2nd Edition (with tweets)Alan Watts commented that the creator was not a churchman. For if he was a churchman we would find the universe populated by rosaries, crucifixes, and cathedrals. These things are the things of churchmen but they are not the things of the creator of the universe. Do they remind us of that creator?

The stained glass at Chartres Cathedral, the medieval illuminated manuscripts, Michelangelo’s Pieta all meant to remind one of the creator. Jesus said, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”(John 20:17) This statement is not a reminder of some distant God but is a reference to an immediate experience. And is Jesus’ message that only he is “ascending to my and your Father, to my God and your God?” No, He holds out the reality that each of us can make this ascension: “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you are “gods”’”? (John 10:34) {The Law to which Jesus refers is perhaps in the Old Testament: “And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.””(Genesis 3:22) No, though we may be as gods we cannot be allowed to live forever.}

So Alan Watts’ critique that churchmen think more about their books, candles, and bells than they do about the direct immediate experience of Jesus’ teaching has its point. How immediate is His teaching? Jesus says, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” (Mark 12:34) So close in fact that you are only a moment of awareness away from entering into God’s kingdom and eternal life with Jesus Christ.And if you are thinking at this point ‘what me a god? I’d make a very poor god, I make a poor sinner truth be told,’ I remind you that Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.” (Matthew 21:31)Indeed it is just those who suffer the most, e.g. prostitutes, the poor, confronted with life’s hardships that can connect with the universal, for in their daily struggles they are given the choice to choose alienation or to make the move into greater connection with others and their world. The key to dealing with the anger in suffering is to find that connection to the greater “self” beyond the suffering separate isolated being.Suffering serious loss causes one to question in anger if we are truly one in Christ yet survivors report redemption in thinking of others. What is needed is for you to stop with the ‘little sinner me’, having known good and evil, and join the universe now, immediately, right this instant. “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” (John 3:3) The “good news” is not that the resurrection and eternal life are found when you are dead but now, as soon as you are born again. God sent an angel who asked, “Why do you seek for He who lives among the dead?” (Luke 24:5) Why? The experience of coming into unity with the universe in the “body of Christ” can only be hinted at for it is an experience not a word.To be born again is not some phony Jimmy Swaggert tears running down your face on TV blubbering but is this moment of transcendence, of ascension, where in you join with Jesus in an eternal life that is eternal because the universe is eternal even though ‘little poor you’ may not be.The realization that you are one with the universe, not fallen out of it, is to be “born again” or as Christian Scientists say “resurrected.” The physicists explain that our bodies are made up of material ejected from stars, yet when told we are one with this universe we doubt. There is an optical illusion that we are separate yet we depend on the atmosphere, biosphere, and sun; just as “Oceans wave, the Universe peoples”---Allen Watts.This is His body this is His blood. Whose body? Whose blood? Before being born again you would have had answered ‘my body my blood’ but now the answer is Corpus Christi.May Major Biden Rest In Peace.